This article will present how to create your first scrum project in Jira. This action is one of the most important ones we need to understand and use correctly. To go to this action at first we need to know some basic terms used in Jira and the logic of a user interface in the website. When you meet with all this terms you propably will not have any problems with using Jira as a tool in your daily project management work.

Dashboards

In the system after the Jira logo we have a tab to Dashboards. Dasbhoards is a place where we can define different layouts with gadgets (graphs, plots, statistics) showing different activities in the system. We can create many dashboards with different set of gadgets. It’s possible to set one dasboard as default dasbhoard after log into the system. Every user can create his own dashboards and share them to other users or stay them to be private. You can see default dashboard below:

When you use fresh Jira installation you probably don’t have any defined dasbhoards besides the default one.

Projects

Project tabs is the place where you will be looking into very often. Under this tab is available a list with:

• currently used projects
• quick access to Software and Business projects
• link to access list with all projects
• possibility to create a new project

In the lesson 02 jira installation process we selected the Scrum software development project type to create Test Scrum Project. This type of project creates the default workflow that constist of the three possible states with transitions to each others.

System informs us that selected Scrum software development project type will use simple three steps workflow: To Do, In Progress and Done.

We also remember after the step with selection the project type it is needed to put some information about a project like below:

• Name – you can use the project name to max 80 characters
• Key – is the shortcut of your project limited up to 10 characters

When you create the project the system keeps you by hand and navigate directly to the list of all available projects. You need to know that on the list there will not be any projects that you don’t have granted permissions to them. From this panel you can easily change the settings of the projects.

Issues

Issues are this place that you can check lastly created/viewed issues by you. From this place you may also open new issue or search any existing ones using advanced filtering.

When you click any recent issue or Search for issue option you will see clearly presented list of issue with possibility to see the detailed content of any selected issue. Later we will see how you can use this panel to make any changes in issue depending on your current needs.

Backlog

In scrum methodology a backlog is a kind of bag where you can put all issue requested by the Product Owner or other members of the team. Issues can be added during whole process of working in the project. We can manage issue by ranking them and setting them priority from low to high. We can also create new kind o priorities for issues.

Sprint

When you have filled backlog with a set of issues you can move some of them into current sprint. Sprint is a place where we currently work on issues. About sprint we need to know some basic informations:

• it is defined by starting date and duration (week, two weeks, three weeks or four weeks) or by starting date and finishing date
• you can create more than one or more sprint forward but only one is active at the moment
• team works only on issues that are move into current sprint
• any issues moved into other sprints than the current ones are only a planned issues (in general by Product Owner)
• we can change an issue state from one state to another by dragging issue
• you close a sprint when you reach the end date

Releases

This place is fantastic if you want to group your issues by release packages instead of sprints. It happens sometimes that one or more issues are not finished in one sprint but they still are part of the current release. Knowing this we can simple present changes in any selected release what is especially important when we manage software projects. Release consists of:

• Version name
• Start date (optional)
• Release date (optional)
• Description (optional)

If you create any release in this tab than you will be able to select it editing any issue or creating ones.

Reports

Reports are very usefull place to analize how quickly issues are resolved in selected sprints or releases. This are available many different kind of reports just out of the box. The only thing you need to do is to select any report and you can start analizing. This is defined over 30 reports and you can even write your own or just buy anyone using atlassian marketplace.

Every time you close the sprint system will redirects you to the lastly selected kind of reports. This functionality allows you quickly analize the summary of the finished sprint.